With the widespread use of digital cameras, people commonly accumulate many hundreds or thousands of photographs. With increased capacity of media cards used in digital cameras and the options available to store photographs on media external to the camera such as portable hard drives, CDs, DVDs, or web servers, the storage of such a relatively large collection of photographs is no longer an issue. The selection of only a few photographs from the collection, however, can be a time consuming process which takes longer as the collection gets larger.
The above issue is of particular concern on devices utilizing small screens, such as cameras and mobile phones. In one such small device environment, users are able to arrange the photographs in their collection into an electronic photo album, which is then produced into a physical equivalent. Typically, given the limitation of the number of pages in such photo albums and/or the expense associated with producing the photographs, the user selects only some of the photographs in his or her collection of photographs and arranges these selected photographs on the pages. However, as indicated above, if the user has a large collection of photographs, an unacceptable amount of time for the small device user can be required to select and arrange these images.
There are many issues with automatically selecting and arranging the images onto the image placeholders in the photo album, most of these issues involve the lack of user involvement, which leads to poor choice of images. Another conventional method is a manual approach. In this method, a representation of the image—or preferably the full image itself, is displayed on the screen. The conventional attempt to solve this difficult problem is by displaying low resolution representations (thumbnails) in separate areas of the screen (to the photo album). These areas are commonly known as “panels”, and the panels with images inside are “image panels”. Currently, this is the most effective approach to allow a user to place the desired images into the image placeholders of an electronic document. However, this method suffers from readability and useability issues when applied to mobile devices, due largely to the size of the screen in such devices.
While a large screen can more easily display many photos from which to choose from, enabling easier and faster photo selection, mobile devices such as cameras and mobile phones typically have a small screen size, and therefore selecting a photo from the photo collection can be time consuming and difficult.